The State of the Blogosphere According to Technorati

There’s quiet a number of interesting information that came out of Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. For those who are not in the loop, this is an annual study conducted by Technorati based on what they’ve unearthed and analyzed from the trends and themes of blogging based on their Index. But for this year’s study, Technorati has also included insights coming from selected bloggers who were asked about how blogging affects their lives and other aspects of the blogging activities they do.

Highlighting the key findings of the State of the Blogosphere 2008 would give us the ff:

there are around 133 million blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

there are 7.4 million blog posts posted since the last 120 days

there are 7.5 million blog posts posted since the last 7 days

there are 900, 000 blog posts in 24 hours

there are 76,000 blog posts with Technorati Authority of 50+

If you have not been following this report since 2002, you would think that the Blogosphere is well and kicking and is continously expanding. Actually not. RandW has an interesting analysis which compared this year’s result of the study with that of previous years.

This year’s report finds that there are on average 900,000 blog posts created every 24 hours. In last year’s report that number was 1.5 million and in 2006 it was 1.3 million. 2005’s report from Technorati didn’t include this number and 2004’s report put it at 400,000 posts per day.

Looking at the first set of data and analysis released by Technorati, the main issue that came out is whether blogging has reached the mainstream? Contrary to what Technorati claims, it has not. Why? Just take a look into the demographics of the types of blogs included in the Technorati study. 83% of the female bloggers have personal blogs with only 38% have professional blogs. For the male bloggers the numbers are slightly different with 76% personal and 50% professional. What does it say then? The Blogosphere is still dominated by bloggers who take blogging as a personal outlet to vent out their rants and raves, likes and dislikes, opinions and reactions on almost anything. Would you consider that valuable information? Some yes, but unfortunately majority are not.

A more relevant question to ask would be – how the blogs have affected the society. How relevant are those blog 94,000 blog posts to humanity. Are those 94,000 unique posts or are just regurgitation of several posts?

Maybe the succeeding parts of the Technorati report can clear this up. There are four more parts of the report to be released in the coming days. And one of them is about blogging for profit.

But to answer the question on whether the Blogosphere has reached the mainstream, again Read and Write’s Richard MacManus’ quote clearly answers it.

The future of blogs will have arrived when you check your favorite blog for sports news in the morning, instead of your local paper.